Pitigrilli

Pitigrilli was the pen name of Dino Segre (Turin, 1893 – Turin, 1975), an Italian writer who made his living as a journalist and novelist in the first half of the twentieth century. The name became so familiar in Italy that it was almost a byword for daring writing. Segre's father was Jewish and his mother Catholic, and he was baptized a Catholic, yet the fascist racial laws classified him as a Jew.

He graduated in law from the University of Turin in 1916 and, after a brief relationship with the poet Amalia Guglielminetti, moved among literary and artistic circles in Turin and Paris. His 1921 novel Cocaine treated drug use and sexuality with a frankness that drew the disapproval of the Catholic Church, which placed it on its list of forbidden books. In 1924 he founded the literary magazine Grandi Firme, which gathered a generation of young writers and illustrators until Mussolini's government shut it down in 1938 under the racial laws.

From 1930 he spent long periods in Paris while keeping his house in Turin. In these years he also worked as an informant for OVRA, the fascist secret police, until he was exposed in 1939. Interned as a Jew in 1940, he later wrote anonymously in Rome to earn a living. After Mussolini fell and Germany occupied Italy, he fled to Switzerland, and in 1948 he settled with his family in Argentina for a decade. He returned to Europe and spent his last years mainly in Paris. His satirical and aphoristic writing was reissued after his death, and his name remains linked to Italian fiction between the wars.